Before the Super Bowls

When I started following football in 1958, there were no Jets – just Giants. And home games weren’t televised because up until the 1970s, a team’s revenue depended entirely on ticket sales. So us kids on Rogers Avenue in Flatbush would watch away-games until half-time, run out and play touch-football for 20 minutes and then return to our tiny black & white screens. And when the Giants were home, we’d play all afternoon with a cheap transistor radio nearby, turned up all the way.

Back then, the Giants’ nemesis was the greatest fullback of all time, Jim Brown. Most people are more likely to remember Brown, who passed away last May at the age of 87, as an actor in The Dirty Dozen or as a character in the terrific 2020 flick, One Night in Miami [Plot: In 1964 Sam Cooke, Cassius Clay, Malcolm X and Jim Brown convivialize a night after Clay beat Liston for the heavyweight crown, with Clay on the verge of becoming Ali.] But Jim was a force of nature on a football field. It took at least three guys to bring him down. After being tackled, he would get up slowly, looking like he might collapse as he stumbled his way back to the huddle, and then explode for a 30 yard run on the very next play. Being new to football, we figured the Cleveland Browns must have named themselves after Jim.

In December 1958 the Giants needed to win their last game of the season at Yankee Stadium against the Browns to tie them for first place and force a playoff. On a very cold, cloudy afternoon, with snow expected by the second half, Jim Brown busted loose for a 65 yard touchdown on the first play from scrimmage, breaking the record for most TDs in a season. Thereafter Pat Summerall and Lou “The Toe” Groza (one of my favorite nicknames of all time – Lou was in fact a huge hulking lineman) traded field goals and the Giants spent the rest of the game tackling Brown, who racked up 183 yards. But his teammates let him down: two fumbles…a missed chippie field goal by Lou the Toe…

Then, in the fourth quarter, after Brown put them down near the goal line, they tried a  fake kick that got smothered, giving the Giants a chance as heavy snow started to fall. Frank Gifford threw a couple of halfback passes to tie the score. At that point, we put our football away and huddled around the radio watching the snow fall. After another fumble recovery, Pat Summerall kicked a 50 yard field goal through the swirling flakes and Rogers Avenue erupted. [Officially it was recorded as a 49 yarder but since snow obscured the yard markers it was anyone’s guess. And if it was 50 yards, that was the longest kick of the 1958 season. Today, 50 yard field goals are commonplace – always a good stat to throw at old curmudgeons like me when we claim yesterday’s athletes were better.] Still, a minute and change remained on the clock.

As Casey Stengel used to say, you could look this up: Jim Brown took the ensuing kickoff and rumbled to the 45 yard line. But after a first down, and with everybody keying on Jim, the Browns relied on lesser lights and their quarterback got sacked for a big loss. It was up to Lou the Toe. His 55 yard attempt fell a couple of yards short.

To my mind, this was “the greatest game ever played,” not the championship match-up two weeks later that the Baltimore Colts won in overtime. Unfortunately the titanic struggle of Jim Brown vs The Giants happened during a long newspaper strike, so New Yorkers not only couldn’t see this game, they couldn’t read about it either. The only pictures that survive are from the Bergen Record. Brown detractors note that until his second marriage, he treated multiple women as if they were safeties to be stiffarmed. They also point to the playoff game that followed a week later when Tom Landry, the Giants’ defensive coach, devised a game plan that stifled Brown as the victorious Giants tackled him for loss after loss. The only touchdown of the game was scored on a trick reverse play devised by the Giants’ offensive guru, Vince Lombardi: quarterback Chuck Conerly hands off to fullback Alex Webster, who then hands off to Frank Gifford who bolts through the line for ten yards and laterals to Conerly by the sideline who scoots another ten yards into the end zone.

By 1961 I was a teenager, old enough to ride the IRT #4 train to 161^st Street and lay down two bucks of my hard-earned money for a crumby centerfield bleacher seat. I remember watching the Giants play the Dallas Cowboys (coached by Tom Landry) and their quarterback, Eddie LeBaron. The Cowboys were 14 point underdogs. LeBaron, at 5’7” and 160 pounds, looked like a kid compared to the behemoths surrounding him. He was drafted in the 10th round, never had a winning season and his career stats were truly awful. For instance, he threw 104 touchdown passes versus 141 interceptions because he could never see over his linemen. But the man was a battler. As a Marine, he was wounded twice in Korea during the battle for Heartbreak Ridge and his NFL nickname was “The Little General.” He beat the Giants that day, of course, on sheer grit.

In 1962 the Giants, who had become a perennial powerhouse, turned those lousy bleacher seats into advance-sale only, so I defected to the sad sack NY Titans, playing right across the Macombs Dam Bridge in the Polo Grounds. It was the third season for the American Football League, the Titans, and their crazy owner, Harry Wismer, a former Public Address announcer for the Detroit Lions who wheeled and dealed his way into becoming the radio voice of the Lions and later, the TV voice for Notre Dame and NFL football. And when the AFL was born, Harry scraped together all his savings and joined the owners’ club. He negotiated a TV contract for the upstart league that stipulated every team would share equally in the revenue – a ground-breaking concept the NFL would eventually adopt. But the network money was chump change back then. Harry needed to sell tickets, lots of tickets, because he was not independently wealthy like all the other owners.

Alas, the Titans sucked. Watching them lose to the Boston Patriots by four TDs, I had most of the upper deck to myself and yet Wismer announced a crowd of 25,000 – HaHaHa! The actual count was 4,719: Harry always lied about the attendance as some sort of wish fulfillment. In fact the Titans attracted only 36,000 paying customers for the entire season, while the Giants drew over 440,000. Poor Harry went belly up and new owners arrived, rebranded the team as the Jets, and drafted Joe Willie Namath in 1965. He got us a Super Bowl victory in 1969 against impossible odds and then began a cavalcade of bad seasons followed by good seasons ending in calamity. Rinse and repeat. Thus was born the terrible acronym, SOJ – Same Old Jets.

“Harry Wismer was an odd man. He used to say ‘Congratulations’ to people he met, on the grounds that they had probably done something they could be proud of.”

George Plimpton, author of Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last String Quarterback

It’s been 54 years without a Super Bowl appearance, so enter a quarterback who, like Joe Willie, travels to the beat of a different drummer: Mr. Magic Mushrooms himself, Aaron Rodgers, four-time NFL MVP – one more than Jim Brown. Of course, Jim, heeding Hollywood’s call, only played nine seasons versus Aaron’s 18. And Jim never tore his Achilles in the opening minute of the first game of the season for his new team. SOJ.

Finally, if you read this before Super Bowl LVIII, here’s a tip: never bet against Patrick Mahomes. Like Jim Brown, the man is money and will be for some time to come.

Unless he somehow gets traded to the Jets.

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